Category Archives: Mystery plants – please ID

It split open sometime today and I brought it inside. I tried to weigh it, but it’s over 11 lbs, the max for our scale.

I looked around the web for id, is it a Hubbard squash?

In case you’re wondering why I don’t know what I’m growing:

I had inoculated a wide variety of seeds prior to planting, including many melon and squash seeds, because I decided to use up all our pre 2013 seeds and we had LOTS. I had each variety in a little plastic cup with a label and I stuck the cups into a planting tray. A few days later I accidentally knocked the tray off the shelf and all the seeds ended up on the dirt floor. I scraped up the big squash and melon seeds and planted them in the tree holes for our new orchard (we didn’t get done on time for bare root trees). And apparently we’ve never grown this squash successfully before, as I’ve never seen this type of squash.

Despite the rather late planting in mid July we got quite a few melons and squash. The spaghetti squash are the best producers, but we also got 3 of these and the other two are much smaller and odd shaped.

Today we looked at a slideshow of the new garden / orchard at our gardening club meeting and I’ll try to figure out how to best get the pics online without spending half a day. We’ve had so much going on lately with hosting WWOOFers and major cleanup / reorganization, but I’ve literally taken thousands of pictures this year and it will take a while to review and post at least some of them.

And I seriously hope that today was our last triple digit day for the year, it’s supposed to cool down. Can’t wait for fall!

10/17/15 update: I’m pretty sure it’s a hubbard squash. We weight the 2 halves and each was over 11 lbs. Several neighbors got a good sized chunk and we make delicious squash soup. Found that we had two plants (both died by now) and we got two small squash, nothing compared to this one. We’ll definitely grow it again, but I don’t know why the others were so much smaller.

These bushes grow in the wash below my property and a few years ago I decided to transplant a few small ones after a monsoon rain. I thought they all died, but the next year I found one or two growing and now I have a whole bunch coming up and currently they are in full bloom.

One of the original transplants

I’m assuming that they are natives because they grow on this undeveloped lot without any irrigation, but have not seen them anywhere else.

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We’re having several plants with LOTS of blue flowers in the hoophouse. I’m sure we planted them or put out seeds, but we can’t find any labels because it’s like a jungle in there and I don’t know what they are. The flowers are much more showy in the morning.